Add links & track messages

Last update: June 11, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • User

Use Journey Optimizer to add links to your content and track the messages sent in order to monitor the behavior of your recipients.

Enable tracking

You can enable tracking at the email message level by checking the Email opens and/or Click on email options when creating your message inside a journey or a campaign, as shown in the tabs below:

NOTE
Both options are enabled by default.

When enabled, these options track the behavior of the recipients of your messages:

  • The Email opens metric checks how many messages have been opened.
  • The Click on email metric calculates the number of clicks on links in an email.

When tracking is enabled, all links included in the message content are tracked.

To insert links into your email content, follow the steps below:

  1. Select an element (text or image) and click Insert link from the contextual toolbar.

  2. Choose the type of link you want to create:

    • Select External link to insert a link to an external URL.

    • Select Landing page to insert a link to a landing page. Learn more

    • Select One click Opt-out to insert a link to enable users to quickly unsubscribe from your communications without the need to confirm opting out. Learn more.

    • Select External Opt-in/Subscription to insert a link to accept receiving communications from your brand.

    • Select External Opt-out/Unsubscription to insert a link to unsubscribe from receiving communications from your brand. Learn more about opt-out management in this section.

    • Select Mirror page to add a link to the email mirror page. Learn more

  3. Enter the desired URL in the corresponding field, or select a landing page, and define the link settings and styles. Learn more

    NOTE
    For interpreting URLs, Journey Optimizer complies with the URI syntax (RFC 3986 standard), which disables some special international characters in URLs. When trying to send the proof or email, if you are returned an error involving a URL added to your content, you can URL encode the string as a workaround.

  4. You can personalize your links. Learn more

  5. Save your changes.

  6. Once the link is created, you can still modify it from the Settings and Styles panes on the right.

NOTE
Marketing-type email messages must include an opt-out link, which is not required for transactional messages. The message category (Marketing or Transactional) is defined in the channel configuration when creating the message.

Link to a mirror page

The mirror page is an online version of your email. Adding a link to the mirror page is an email marketing good practice. Users can browse to the mirror page of an email, for example if they are experiencing rendering issues or broken images when trying to view it in their inbox. It is also recommended to provide an online version for accessibility reasons, or to encourage social sharing.

The mirror page generated by Adobe Journey Optimizer contains all personalization data.

To add a link to a mirror page in your email, insert a link and select Mirror page as the type of link.

The mirror page is automatically created. Once the email is sent, when the recipients click the mirror page link, the content of the email is displayed in their default web browser.

The retention period for a mirror page is 60 days. After that delay, the mirror page is no longer available.

CAUTION

  • Mirror pages links are auto-generated and cannot be edited. They contain all the encrypted personalized data that is required to render the original email. As a result, using personalised attributes with large values may generate lengthy mirror pages URLs, which can prevent the link from working in web browsers that have a maximum URLs length.

  • In the proof sent to the test profiles, the link to the mirror page is not active. It is only active in the final messages.

You can make adjustments to your links such as underlining them, change their color, or select their target. These changes are set in the Settings and Styles panes on the right section of the content editor.

The target attribute is used to control where a linked page will open. Adding a target attribute in an anchor tag can specify if the link should open in a new tab, the same tab, or a different frame.

To define the target of a link, follow these steps:

  1. In a Text component where a link is inserted, select your link.

  2. From the Settings tab, select where the link opens in the Target drop-down. Possible values are listed below:

    • None: opens the link in the same frame as it was clicked (default).
    • Blank: opens the link in a new window or tab.
    • Self: opens the link in the same frame as it was clicked.
    • Parent: opens the link in the parent frame.
    • Top: opens the link in the full body of the window.

  3. Save your changes.

Check the Underline link option to underline the label of your link.

To change the color of your link, click on Link color from the Styles tab.

Manage tracking

The Email Designer allows you to manage the tracked URLs, such as editing the tracking type for each link.

  1. Click the Links icon from the left pane to display the list of all the URLs of your content that will be tracked.

    This list enables you to have a centralized view and to locate each URL in the email content.

  2. To edit a link, click the corresponding pencil icon.

  3. You can modify the Tracking Type if needed:

    For each tracked URL, you can set the tracking mode to one of these values:

    • Tracked: Activates tracking on this URL.
    • Opt out: Considers this URL as an opt-out or unsubscription URL.
    • Mirror page: Considers this URL is a mirror page URL.
    • Never: Never activates tracking of this URL.

Reporting on openings and clicks is available in the Live report and in the Customer Journey Analytics report.

Personalize URL tracking

URL tracking is managed at the configuration level and applies to all URLs included in your message content.

You can also personalize individual URLs in the Email Designer. To add personalized URL tracking parameters to a single link in your content, follow the steps below.

  1. Select a link and click Insert link from the contextual toolbar.

  2. Select the personalization icon. It is only available for these types of links: External link, Unsubscription link and Opt-Out.

  3. Add the URL tracking parameter and select the profile attribute of your choice from the personalization editor.

  4. Save your changes.

  5. Repeat the steps above for each link you want to add this tracking parameter to.

Now when the email is sent out, this parameter will be automatically appended to the end of the URL. You can then capture this parameter in web analytics tools or in performance reports.

NOTE
To verify the final URL, you can send a proof and click the link in the content of the email once you receive the proof. The URL should display the tracking parameter. In the example above, the final URL will be: https://luma.enablementadobe.com/content/luma/us/en.html?utm_contact=profile.userAccount.contactDetails.homePhone.number
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